Report: Ted Kennedy’s Obama endorsement based on rage and vanity

posted at 9:36 am on January 31, 2008 by Bryan

If the WaPo’s Mary Ann Akers is correct, Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama not because Obama is such a great candidate in his own right. Obama just happened to be the lucky recipient of a rebound. The endorsement would presumably have gone to John Edwards or anyone else who happened to be Hillary’s main competition when Uncle Ted flew into a rage. Because it wasn’t about the candidate. It was about the Kennedys.

Sources say Kennedy was privately furious at Clinton for her praise of President Lyndon Baines Johnson for getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act accomplished. Jealously guarding the legacy of the Kennedy family dynasty, Senator Kennedy felt Clinton’s LBJ comments were an implicit slight of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who first proposed the landmark civil rights initiative in a famous televised civil rights address in June 1963.

One anonymous source described Kennedy as having a “meltdown” in reaction to Clinton’s comments. Another source close to the Kennedy family says Senator Kennedy was upset about two instances that occurred on a single day of campaigning in New Hampshire on Jan. 7, a day before the state’s primary.

The first was at an event in Dover, N.H., at which Clinton supporter Francine Torge introduced the former first lady saying, “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually” signed the civil rights bill into law.

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Kennedy was also apparently upset that Clinton said on the same day: “Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Ac. It took a president to get it done.”

Both comments that day, by Clinton and her supporter, were meant to make the point that Clinton would be better equipped to get things done as president than Obama, her chief Democratic rival. Sources say Clinton called Kennedy to apologize for the LBJ comments. But whatever she said clearly wasn’t enough to assuage Kennedy, who endorsed Obama earlier this week.

How pathetic is this: The “change” candidate gets his Camelot remnant endorsement based not on his qualifications or what he’ll do for the country, but based on how offended the Kennedy capo got at what Hillary Clinton said about events that took place more than 40 years ago. Ted Kennedy’s eloquent speech endorsing Obama was just so much window-dressing. It won over David Brooks, for whatever that’s worth, but Kennedy probably didn’t mean a word of it. Kennedy is just using Obama to lash out at the Clintons.

It just goes to show that at the end of the day, the Kennedys still don’t care about anything more than their own dynastic identity. If they really cared about real “change,” they would leave the political scene. The Kennedy soap opera should have long past run its course.

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It’s almost funny to see all these puffed-up egos fighting over who gets credit for the Civil Rights Act. Each person should be given credit for his part, whether it’s LBJ for signing it after twisting some Congressional arms, or JFK for proposing it, or Dr. King and numerous unnamed others for inspiring it. Of course, I realize that such humility and perspective are not going to come from a career politician.

Very petty if true. However, the Clinton legacy looks like a ship scene from Pirates of the Caribbean with lots of interesting characters and years worth of scores to settle.

The rest of the primary season will be the Democratic Night of the Long Knives, until Hillary gets it and then puppy love sets in and politicians with no values act like whatever was said in the primaries was theater for the natives.

How many potentially great public servants never make an attempt to run for office due to lack of money and how many power hungry, self important, self serving gas bags get elected to high office only because they have the money to run? Very few of these gasbags have any real passion, they’re just motivated by power and prestige. Those of us motivated by passion lack the funds to defeat the gasbags. Extreme wealth, inherited anyway, seems to leave its owners without a set of core convictions, without any real beliefs. Teddy boy seems driven more by Chappaquiddick (sp?) guilt and a desire to keep the Kennedy name in lights than by anything else.

Talk radio was all aflutter in Boston the day this happened, a few callers had the Malkins to bring up Mary Jo Kopechne to Eagan (R) & Braudie (commie pinko). Both poohpoohed the caller saying sure Teddy “made a mistake” in the past and “may have contributed to MJK’s death” but his long tenure of working for the people since then and that “he’s been a father to his brother’s kids” shows he’s paid back his debt.

The caller wisely used the logic that we should let all murder’s go free then to have the same chance as Kennedy to pay their debt?

Un-F’n believable how dedicated to the Kennedy mobsters the old hippy libs and baby boomers are. Nothing, not even murder, sexual harrassment, and rape can shake them from their delusions.

My theory as to why Teddy and Leahy and some of the other old time liberals are backing Obama, Osama, yo’ momma is because he is as far left (or further) as they are. With his total lack of experience they can take him under their wings and make him their ‘boy’. He will feel obligated to them and he will let it happen. If he is elected we can look for the most left wing (Kennedy/Leahy, etc.) agenda we have ever seen.

Was Teddy’s endorsement so important?
Seriously..how many people actually care?

bridgetown on January 31, 2008 at 10:13 AM

Endorsement power comes more from who is in the endorser’s Rolodex than any symbolic value. Thus why Obama stands to gain greatly from Ted’s endorsement, Crist’s endorsement helped McCain, and Tancredo’s endorsement didn’t help Mitt much at all.